Lean Forward

Mark 13

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.”  -- Mark 13:31

Happy New Year!

Lutheran Christians and others who follow a liturgical year probably get the reference.  Others, might scratch their heads and think, “the fool’s a month early!”   In the Christian Calendar, Sunday, December 3, 2017, the First Sunday in Advent, marks the beginning of a new church year.   Each year, the calendar focuses on one of the Gospels, and, this year, the majority of our Gospel readings will come from Mark.  I like this Gospel for it’s urgency and the way the whole Gospel leans forward toward the cross.

Mark was likely written around the time of the Jewish War (66-73 CE) and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 CE.  Those were tumultuous times in Judea and the region around Jerusalem.  To the Jews and Christians living during those dark days, it must have seemed like the whole world was falling apart.  We know that the Christian community fled the violence in Jerusalem and immigrated to Syria in the late 60’s.  The original readers of the Gospel heard Jesus’ prophesy in Mark 13 against this violent, uncertain and terrifying backdrop.  

In the context of Mark’s telling of Jesus’ story, Mark 13 was spoken to his uncertain and confused disciples as they balanced on the precipice of the crucifixion.  Jesus had warned them three times that he was going to Jerusalem to die.  They didn’t understand.  His confrontations with the leaders of the people grew more and more intense as the last week in Jerusalem passed.  They didn’t get it.  “Keep awake!”  He said, but they couldn’t manage to stay awake for an hour as he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane (14:37).

The picture Jesus paints in Mark 13 may be bleak and terrifying, but doesn’t it describe the way life is often experienced in this broken world?  Perhaps that’s why so many people down through the centuries have read Jesus’ words and have said, “this is us.”  But there is a promise here.  It is the promise of the birth of Immanuel (which means “God with us”).  It is the promise of an empty tomb on the far side of the horrors of the cross.  It is the promise of a Christian community that survived the Jewish War of the early 70s CE and many other trials and tribulations in the years since.  It is the promise that Jesus’ words will not pass away.  Not now, not ever.

We still live in tumultuous times, don’t we?   North Korea launched an ICBM this week that the “experts” say could reach any place in the United States.  Scary stuff.   Wars and rumors of war circle the globe with fear and terror and uncertainty.  The pervasiveness of hatred and abuse and harassment are revealed in the halls of the powerful and privileged and even from those once respected in our land.  To quote a line from a 1987 R.E.M song,  is this “the end of the world as we know it?”  

Maybe.  Maybe not.  But Jesus’ words to us are the same as they have always been:

Stay alert!  Continue to trust the promise.  Stay focused on the mission.  Love God.  Love one another.  Love your neighbor as yourself.   Lean forward into whatever the future may hold knowing that God truly goes with us.  Always.

Blessed New Year!

Peace,

Bishop Mike.

Thanks for reading.

One Talent Wonders

Matthew 25:14-30

“…so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground…”  Matthew 25:25 

I have spent most of my years as a pastor around small ministries.  Small campus ministries.  Small congregations.  Small synods.  In a culture that promotes “bigger is better” and a consumerist mentality that always yearns for more, “small” is often deemed a shortcoming, an impediment, something of lesser value.  Certainly, small ministries have their challenges.  Money is often one of them.  People in small ministries often feel like they don’t have the assets to do anything.  The constant threat is to turn inward and succumb to a fear-driven survival mentality that shackles imagination and creativity.  The temptation is to do what the man in Jesus’ parable with one talent did…  bury what little we have in the ground.   Last one out turn out the lights.  But small ministries also have some advantages.  They are capable of close, intimate relationships of caring and compassion.  They can be very nimble, make decisions quickly and carry out actions swiftly, unfettered by complicated bureaucracies.  They can involve everyone in the ministry and can be very creative with the limited gifts they have.   I know and have known small ministries that are vital, alive and engaged.  “Scrappy” little ministries (as a friend puts it) that take their one talent and squeeze everything they can out of it for the sake of the Gospel.

The story of scripture is not a story of the strong, the mighty and the huge.  It is the story of Abram and Sarai who God took and used to bless the world.  It is the story of a little nation of refugees and exiles who, in spite of their challenges, mistakes, miscues and disasters managed to trust that God was with them.  It is the story of a child named Jesus who was born in a barn, called and equipped twelve guys and a handful of women and sent them out to change the world.  It is the story of a tentmaker named Paul who built a church in spite of a mountain of obstacles.  The common thread in all these stories is not the great assets these people possessed (usually quite the opposite), but the God of steadfast love, endless compassion and patience, and bottomless grace and mercy who walked with them every step of the way – even through death itself.  A God who sets fear-driven, survival shackled, asset challenged, small people like us free from the darkness where we weep and gnash our teeth and uses us to do amazing things.

Large ministry or small, our faithful God is and always will be the greatest asset God’s Church has.  We can trust that.  Perhaps, small ministries have some advantage in seeing that – because, sometimes, it seems, that’s all we got.

Peace,

Bishop Mike 

Blessings on you wherever you carry out your ministry!   This Thanksgiving, I am grateful for each one of you.  Thanks for reading.   (I’ll be on vacation next week…  so “On the Way” will be back in two weeks.  Have a blessed Thanksgiving!)

Confessions of a Procrastinator

Matthew 25:1-13

“When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them…”  --Matthew 25:3

I admit it.  I am a procrastinator.  Always have been.  Probably always will be.  I need the pressure of deadlines to keep me motivated.  Take this column, for example.  We send out the synod’s “Weekly News” e-newsletter on Friday mornings.  I frequently write it on Friday morning.  I write sermons on Saturday night (I think and pray about them all week, but write on Saturdays when the deadline of Sunday morning is looming.)  I have always felt a certain affinity to the foolish bridesmaids and their empty lamps.  Trust me, poor preparation has a way of catching up with you.

I say that as a way of bracketing what I am about to say:  I don’t think this parable is about praising the wise bridesmaids nor judging the foolish ones.  Jesus says that this parable is supposed to teach his disciples something about the Reign of God.  Something about the Kingdom of Heaven.   It delivers a similar message to what we’ve heard in recent months from other parables in Matthew:  the “Weeds and the Wheat”  (Matthew 13:24-30) and the “Parable of the Wedding Banquet” (Matthew 22:11-14) to name a few.   Through these parables, Jesus teaches his followers that the Reign of God is not always easy to see in the midst of a complex and often difficult world.  Not everyone is going to “get” it.  Even more, some will openly resist its message of hope, and promise and Good News.  I think Jesus tells these parables because the disciples were sometimes completely dumbfounded by the fact that the people around them missed what seemed so obvious to them (and which they regularly proved they didn’t understand either). 

My second confession is that sometimes I don’t get it either.  Sometimes I think I clearly see the Reign of God breaking in all around me.  Sometimes I wonder where God is in the midst of the insanity of the world.  When someone guns people down in their house of worship, or at a concert, or nightclub, or nightly on the streets of our cities, the Reign of God seems horribly distant.  When I gather at a banquet with a group of several hundred friends who are working for peace, justice and reconciliation in the world like I did last night, I see glimmers of the Kingdom shimmering in the night.  

But, Jesus never leaves the disciples or us standing foolishly on the doorstep of the Kingdom with our empty lamps and dying flames.   Jesus tells us what to do.   “Keep awake,” he says.   Use the assets God has placed in your hands in God’s service.  Care for hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned.  Teach people all he has commanded us about loving God and loving neighbor.  Invite people to join you on the way.  But then he takes it one step further.  He opens the door to the Reign of God for all – yes, even for foolish procrastinators – by dying on a cross and rising again on the third day.   It is the promise of that act of love that keeps our lamps full and our lights burning throughout even the darkest of nights.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Please pray for all those who suffer from violence. 

As always, thank you for reading.   

The Hope of Reconciliation

On the 500^th Anniversary of the Reformation

For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God – not the result of works, so that no one can boast.  For we are what God has made us, created in Jesus Christ for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.  –Ephesians 2:8-10

Once, I was interviewing for a new call and the call committee asked me about my favorite bible verse.  I hesitated, verses rattling around in my brain.   It depended a lot upon what was going on in my life at the time.  But, finally, I settled on Ephesians 2:8-10.   For me, these verses sum up the heart of my faith.  While these are not the “traditional” Reformation verses,  (Romans 3:21-31),  they crystalize for me the insight into God’s graciousness that drove Martin Luther to question and challenge the church of his time. 

The core of Luther’s insight and these verses from Ephesians is just this:  salvation is God’s doing, not our own.  God acts to reconcile the world to God’s self through Christ.  Even our ability to trust in that reconciling act (faith) is a gift from God.   The minute we start to boast about the superiority of our personal theology, righteousness, holiness or morality, we’ve missed the point.  (And we all do it from time to time, don’t we?). 

But why would God give us such an amazing gift?  Why save us?   The first and best answer is that God loves us and created us and everything that exists out of that great love.  But, Ephesians reminds us that God also created us for a purpose.   God saves us from ourselves so that we can be who God intended us to be in the first place:  the caretakers of the creation God loves…  including one another.  God saves us from our brokenness and death so that we can join God in the work of reconciling a broken and suffering world.   We were not created and recreated in Christ just to wallow in God’s love for us.  We were created in Christ to live in and through and out of that love as a way of life. 

On this 500^th anniversary of the Reformation, it is that grace-centered, reconciling way of life that we are called to live and embody as God’s people in the world.   This is not a time for denominational boasting.   It is a time for re-committing ourselves to join God in the hard work of reconciliation.  It is a time for re-committing ourselves to the work of caretaking that God created us for.

These next days, there will be commemorations and prayer services and gatherings around the world to mark the 500 years since Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” in Wittenberg, Germany.   Many of these events will bring Lutheran and Catholic and other Christians together to reflect on 500 years of division and to rejoice in the growing unity among us.  It is my hope and prayer that these events will provide the impetus to continue the work of reconciliation that has marked the last half-century and spur us to continue working together to share God’s love, mercy and compassion with a hurting world.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Please pray for peace, with justice, among all God’s children all around the world.  Thanks for reading.

Coin of the Realm

Matthew 22:15-22

 

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s and to God the things that are God’s”  (vs. 21)

But God says…

“…for the world and all that is in it is mine…”  Psalm 50:12b

Politics and religion.  Religion and politics.   The world of the First Century was not at all like ours.  No one in that time could have conceived of today’s “separation of church and state”.  In those day, politics and religion were inextricably intertwined.  Many of the things Jesus said and did had political as well as religious implications, which is why the religious leaders (who also had political power) found him so threatening they wanted him dead.   This week’s Gospel is more than just a clever coin trick.  It represents a clash of empires and expectations.  The questions it raises have to do with more than paying taxes.  They have to do with what we consider and accept as the coin of the realm.

The coin the Pharisees brought to Jesus likely bore the image of the Roman Emperor Tiberius.  One common coin in circulation from that time had an impression of Tiberius on the front and Caesar Augustus’ wife Liva depicted as the goddess of peace on the back (pictured above).  This coin made both a political and religious statement.  It depicted a god who claimed ultimate power, which, according to the Jewish law, was idolatry.  Jesus traps the Pharisees in their own rules.  (Gotcha!)   But even more, he calls into question their loyalty to the very God they claimed to honor by fastidiously following the rules.   Jesus asks, “Who do you Pharisees really worship?  Who really is your god?   Who do you really think the world belongs to?”  Good questions for us to consider too!

Today, some Christians would suggest that the community of faith should have nothing to say about politics.  They argue that faith is about our personal relationship with Jesus, but should have nothing to say about our communal life in the world.   But, the scriptures and Jesus were adamant that God was the God of heaven AND earth, and that everything private and public, personal and communal, belongs to God.   If our faith has nothing to say about our public life, then we have a pretty weak faith, and by extension, a pretty puny god. 

But, for those who belong to the Reign of God, the coin of the realm does not bear the imprint of Washington or Franklin or Hamilton, it bears the imprint of Jesus.  It bears the imprint of Jesus upon a cross.  It bears the imprint of the One who, in great love, paid the tax of human violence, hatred, brokenness, pain and suffering in full.  It bears the imprint of the One who has always hung with all those who suffer and with all those who hang with the suffering of our world today.  For us, the coin of the realm is the Love of the God of heaven and earth, the compassion of God’s Son, and the enduring and eternal life which he offers free to everyone.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  (Matthew 6:21).  So, I wonder, what coin do we have in our pockets?

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading.